"This paper begins with Demián Flores Cortés' sculpture of a figure holding a Christian cross and a statue of the Santa Muerte. Like other work that has at times been called syncretic, mestizaje, or New World baroque, the sculpture manifests the inadequacy of efforts to categorize and compartmentalize visual and artistic expression. If visual methodologies commit to a de/anti/colonial ethic and epistemology, then the time travel, insertion, and indeed infiltration of indigenous and hybrid representation do not represent a reconciling of cultures, religions, or societies, but rather a “will to survive and persist culturally”. The counter-hegemonic, or even counter-conquest reversal and resignification of iconographic conventions falling outside disciplinary traditions of analysis call for visual methods to permit the resemantization of representing and reporting on visual “data”. This paper then takes the destabilization offered by these tensions to ask: What then are the implications for visual research methods? And for visual literacy more broadly?"
